Hands-On With Intel's "Menlow" Prototypes

LAS VEGASAt the Intel booth at CES 2008, the largest crowd gathered around several handheld devices that showcased Intel's latest Menlow Mobile Internet Device Platform. Considering that the company doesn't expect to deliver this new platform until the second quarter of this year, it was a pleasant surprise to see a total of five working prototypes at the show.

The Menlow platform is designed around the Silverthorne processor, a 45-nm process running at Pentium M speeds, and the Poulsbo chipset, which consists of the graphics subsystem and wireless component.

Although these devices were early pre-production units, I was able to get my paws on several of these unnamed models, including devices from Lenovo, Clarion, DigiFriends, Aigo, and Toshiba. All of them have Silverthorne processors, with speeds ranging from 800-MHz to 1.33-GHz, plus the Poulsbo US15 chipset. Four of the five units load Red Hat Linux, yet only one dared to load Windows Vista.

What baffled me was that only two of the five devices had physical, QWERTY keypads, but every single one possessed a touchscreen. Overall, performance was underwhelming, even on the Linux devices. Perhaps these devices needed a hard reboot or were damaged from the countless hands that touched them, but lag time and stalled applications were serious issues.

It was refreshing to see a familiar face like Lenovo on a Menlow device. This unit has the feel of a Sony PSP and draws just as many fingerprints. It has a 5-inch touchscreen that runs a rather unresponsive version of Red Hat Linux. It responded to several of my touch commands, but launching the video and music player stalled the system. The keypad on the right side of the unit reminds of a typical phone keypad, which looks like it's only good for texting and dialing numbers. The mouse button is right above the keypad, with a webcam located on the left side. Interestingly enough, an external antenna is located at the base of the system, giving way to the possibility of DVB TV or mobile TV on this device.

DigiFriends, a Korean company, showed off its WiMAX MID, which looked the most promising out of all the Menlow devices. It integrates a full QWERTY keypad that can be swapped out with several cover accessories, like an extra battery, a battery charger, or Hi-Fi Stereo speakers. As you can tell from the name, the device is also WiMAX-enabled, with Intel's latest wireless chip. Currently, Korea is the only country that has rolled out WiBro networks, a similar technology to WiMax.

The WiMax MID runs an Intel Silverthorne 1.2-GHz processor, 1 Gbyte of RAM, and a 30-Gbyte hard drive using a 1.3-inch form factor. It has a built-in 0.3 Megapixel webcam in the front and a 2 Megapixel webcam in the rear. It's also the only device that dared to load Windows Vista. Sadly, the system was completely unresponsive to touch and keyboard commands.

The Clarion device has its focus on GPS functions, running Red Hat Linux.

The Aigo prototype has a slide QWERTY keyboard. You can find a USB port on the side, a 3.0-megapixel webcam, and a Micro SD slot.

Finally, the Toshiba device is draped in some kind of aluminum alloy. Unfortunately, the device completely drained its battery, so I couldn't test out its version of Red Hat Linux. There's a right and a left click mouse button on each side of the screen. The feature set remains simple, with a lone USB port and a single headphone port.

The silver lining is that Intel has built a strong marketing campaign around the Menlow platform, highlighting that the CPU will use ten times less power than the previous UMPC platform. Although performance is not quite there yet, battery life will be a key component to this platform. The Silverthorne chips are also cheap to manufacture, according to Intel, so price will be a determining factor, as well. For Intel's sake, let's hope these devices fall under the $500 price point.

Cisco Cheng is the Lead Analyst of the laptop team at PCMag.com. He’s a one-man wrecking crew who tests and writes about anything considered a laptop (yes, even netbooks). He’s been with PC Mag for over 10 years and gets occasional headaches from all the technical knowledge he has absorbed during that time. He’d still be snowboarding and playing basketball had he not been through multiple knee surgeries (well, two). Now he spends his time with Google Reader, the iPhone 3G, and his now 3-year...
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